Which Group Of Customers Deserve The Most Attention?

As an entrepreneur, you naturally want to give all your customers quality service. Smart business, however, means giving some customers more attention than others. Who are these VIPs? Find out in this video episode.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 3:57 — 9.8MB)

Video highlights:

00:20 – Your three customer groups
00:40 – Where banks and telcos get it wrong
01:57 – The 100% example
03:05 – Your second important customer group

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Transcription:

James Schramko here, and today I want to share with you which group of customers you should pay the most attention to in your business. And it may not be who you think.

James Schramko

Let’s say there’s three groups of customers, for simplicity. There are first-time customers, then there’s the regular customers who you see fairly often, maybe they’ve been there a while. And then there’s the super customers, the VIPs, the ones who buy the most, they’ve been there forever.

Your priority customers

So of those three, let’s hope that you can serve all of them really well. But if you had a choice, there’s one group that you want to pay particular attention to. First and foremost of course, that is the VIPs, because they’ve proven that they’re loyal, they spend the money, and like banks and telecommunication companies and finance companies always get this wrong, they’re always looking for new customers and they burn their existing customers. So I always give the best prices to my existing customers. I give the early bird notification to my best customers, and I suggest you do the same.

“Banks and telecommunication companies always get this wrong.”

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Knowing the best

How do you know who your best customers are? Look into your shopping cart or your email system, do some lead scoring where you assign points for your best customers so you can pull up a list of your top customers.

You should at least know your top 10 customers, and your team should know your top 10 customers. In our team, we used to use a little tilde sign to distinguish who is a VIP customer. So we’d always make sure we look after them extra specially.

OK, who’s the second group that you should look after? If you can’t look after all of them, let’s say you have thin resources, I’ll tell you. The very, very most important group to look after, as long as you’ve looked after your VIPs, is actually…no wait. I want to tell you about something I did earlier.

The coffee shop experience

I actually went and bought a coffee today, from a coffee shop nearby. Now I used to go to this coffee shop, it was a different brand, and I go to a couple of coffee shops around Manly fairly often. So over a year, I could buy quite a lot of coffee. Over four years, which is about how long I’ve been here, I’ve bought a lot of coffees even though I have a coffee machine at home. I like to go and leave the house.

“The experience that counts for a lot…”

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I went to this brand new place today, and it was my first experience with them. So just to put that in perspective, 100 percent of my experience with this shop is happening when I make that first purchase. If they don’t get it right, I probably won’t go back. But if I go to a coffee shop where I’ve been buying coffee for the last four years, and they don’t get it quite right, well, that might only be one percent of my experience. Let’s say I bought a hundred coffees from this shop, and one time it wasn’t great. Well, that’s one percent wasn’t fantastic. But if I go to a new shop and 100 percent of my experience is negative, I’m less likely to go back. So therefore, the other group of customers you really want to pay attention to are first-time customers.

If you are a business owner, put particular attention into your first interaction because that is 100 percent of your customer’s experience. They’re going to judge you on that experience. That’s how you set the tone for the rest of the relationship.

Summary

So quick recap: of course, look after your VIPs, but the very next group that you should really focus on is the first-time customer.

I’m James Schramko, this is SuperFastBusiness.com. I hope you’ve enjoyed this tip. Go ahead and comment below. Leave a rating on iTunes if you enjoyed it. I look forward to catching up with you in a future episode.

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